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Reality Check: Understanding the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK)

March 2, 2010 by

The Huffington Post
March 2, 2010
By Ali Safavi, Member of Iran’s Parliament in Exile; President of Near East Policy Research

The Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) was founded in 1965 by three Muslim university graduates and sought to replace the Shah’s dictatorship with a representative government that respects human rights. But after the 1979 revolution, it fell victim to the new dictatorship’s onslaught. So far, it has lost tens of thousands of its members and supporters to the ruling regime, most famously during a massacre in 1988, which Amnesty International has dubbed “a crime against humanity.”[1] Though a Muslim organization, the MEK seeks a secular republic in Iran based on democracy and political pluralism.

Given that despite an unprecedentedly harsh crackdown, the Tehran regime has failed to extinguish the freedom cry in Iran which erupted more than eight months ago, it is imperative to get a better understanding of the organized opposition, whose role in future developments will continue to be of critical importance. In virtue of its significant impact on Iranian affairs over the past 45 years, especially following the 1979 revolution, the MEK has long been targeted by the regime and its foreign apologists with a plethora of accusations meant to vilify the organization and diminish its influence now and in the future.

The purpose of this forum is to dispense with some of these myths originally propagated by Tehran’s intelligence services against the MEK, and also try to respond to various questions regarding the organization and its actions. Readers are welcome to comment on these posts or ask for further clarification.

NEXT WEEK: Mujahedin-e Khalq: Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?****

Mujahedin-e Khalq: “Islamic-Marxists”?

“Masud [Massoud] Rajavi… is the leader of the movement. Its intention is to replace the current backward Islamic regime with a modernized Shiite Islam drawing its egalitarian principles from Koranic sources rather then Marx” ~ Former Undersecretary of State George W. BallOne of the many allegations levied against the MEK has been that it is an “Islamic-Marxist” organization, purportedly combining Marxist philosophy with its proclaimed Islamic ideology.

The MEK was founded in 1965 as a Muslim organization. It saw the society divided between tyranny and liberation forces, and not believers and non-believers. Like most Iranians, its founders sought a secular republic and the establishment of a democracy in Iran. MEK has never endeavored towards an ideological government, be it Islamic or otherwise.

The origins of the “Islamic-Marxist” label date back to the early 1970s, when the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, sought to erode the organization’s growing popularity among young Iranians. The Iranian scholar Afshin Matin-Asgari described it as “an ingenious polemical label” used by the Shah’s regime to discredit its enemies.[2]

After the Shah’s overthrow in 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the newly established clerical regime, recycled the Shah’s propaganda relics in his own attempts to alienate a new generation of Iranians who wanted a democratic order. At the forefront of this generation was the MEK, which according to historian Ervand Abrahamian, came into the fore with a “reputation as a modern secular organization.”[3]

The group’s gatherings attracted hundreds of thousands of people. More than half a million people took part in its protest in June 1981.[4] By mid-1981, “the circulation of Mojahed [MEK’s newspaper] had reached 500,000” far surpassing the official newspapers.[5] For Khomeini, this was a serious force to be reckoned with.

To confront the MEK, he alleged that the organization is not truly Islamic. Claiming that it had an “eclectic” ideology, which mixed Islam with Marxism, he called them “the Monafeqin” (literally, “hypocrites”), a derogatory term which is still used by the regime (most notably in their gatherings with the chants of “Death to America, Death to Monafeqin”).

By doing this, Khomeini wanted to pave the way for the violent crack down on the organization’s activities. In other words, his plan was to delegitimize the MEK first on religious grounds and then proceed to eliminate it.

In a 1981 interview, Massoud Rajavi, then MEK’s leader, said: “Every high school student knows that believing in God, Jesus Christ and Muhammad is incompatible with the philosophy of Marxism. … But for dictators like Khomeini, ‘Islamic Marxist’ is a very profitable phrase to use against any opposition. If Jesus Christ and Muhammad were alive and protesting against Khomeini, he would call them Marxists, too.”[6]

In fact, MEK’s history shows a pronounced rejection of the philosophy of Marxism. In late 1979, Massoud Rajavi presented the ideological viewpoints of the MEK in a series of lectures in Tehran University entitled “Comprehending the World,” later published in a 15-volume book. The lectures were meant to clearly demarcate the MEK’s Islamic ideology against Khomeini’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam on the one hand and Marxism on the other.[7]

According to Syracuse University professor Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Rajavi provides the MEK’s critique of the limitations of a host of “isms” such as scholasticism, positivism, pragmatism, scientism, empiricism, and rationalism. But Rajavi saves his most extensive critical commentary for Marxist materialistic epistemology. The chief target of the lectures was the Russian biochemist Aleksander Ivanovich Oparin (1894-1980), whose theory on the origin of life was first formulated in 1922. By subjecting the materialistic doctrines of Oparin and a host of other orthodox Marxist thinkers to a philosophical critique, the MEK hoped to challenge the vigorous presence of Marxism within Iranian intellectual circles. The group remained skeptical of Marxism’s philosophical postulates and rejected the latter’s cardinal doctrine of historical materialism. It held firm to the beliefs in the existence of God, revelation, the afterlife, the spirit, salvation, destiny, and the people’s commitment to these intangible principles.[8]

So, clearly, the MEK’s is not Marxist. If it were, Khomeini would have been able to easily eradicate the organization. But, in fact, in virtue of its ideology which had its roots in a Muslim country, the MEK survived Khomeini’s ideological onslaught, which incidentally eliminated every other opponent, including Marxists, from the political arena at the time.[9]

The MEK’s ideological stance also guaranteed its complete independence from other political powers like the Soviet Union. Precisely because of such emphasis on independence and freedom, Marxist organizations like the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party vehemently spurned the MEK.[10]

The Tudeh leaders’ unconditional backing of Khomeini, part of a policy dictated by the Soviet KGB, led them to describe the MEK as “a bastion of liberalism and imperialism.” The Tudeh Party described the MEK’s actions during those years as American conspiracies, and many MEK supporters later executed on Khomeini’s orders were wrapped in American flags before burial.

In his book, The Center of the Universe: The Geopolitics of Iran, Graham E. Fuller noted that the Mojahedin’s Islamic orientation was a major impediment to the Soviets’ effort to gain influence within the organization: “The Soviets in the past have also been interested in other leftist movements such as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (‘The People’s Holy Warriors’) but had almost no success in establishing any influence over it because of that group’s own suspicions of Moscow and its at least nominal commitment to Islam.” [11]

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, especially after the Bolshevik victory in Russia, Iran’s northern provinces like Gilan and Mazandaran turned into the mainstay of the pro-Moscow Communist Tudeh Party. Marxism further gained momentum among Iranian youths and intellectuals after Marxist-inspired movements sprang up in Africa and Latin America in the latter half of the century.

Against this backdrop, the MEK’s arrival into the political scene, as the first democratic Muslim organization in contemporary Iran, changed the landscape completely. Intellectuals and youths now felt their ideals revived in an organization with potential mass appeal that could materialize their democratic desires. Following the 1979 revolution, the MEK’s growth proved that earlier predictions about its widespread appeal were indeed true.

People in the northern provinces, for example, began to embrace the MEK’s Islamic ideology on a wide scale. Roughly a year after the Revolution, more than 300,000 people from the city of Rasht in Gilan province gathered in a stadium to hear MEK’s leader Massoud Rajavi speak. The rising tide of support for the MEK in former Tudeh strongholds, helped increase the Marxist and Communist organizations’ enmity towards the MEK. At the same time, the MEK’s tolerant and democratic interpretation of Islam alienated and threatened Khomeini’s fundamentalist clique. This explains why the Communist Tudeh and the ostensibly Islamic Khomeinists quickly forged an unexpected and ironic alliance against the MEK.

In a 1979 report from Tehran, the Washington Post wrote about the MEK’s “large public following,” adding that the “Mujahideen owe much of their impact to their unquestioned religious credentials, which make them acceptable — if sometimes only barely — to Khomeini’s followers in contrast to the Marxists, Maoists, Trotskyites and other atheist splinter groups.”[12]

The MEK’s Islamic ideology, however, is also sharply distinct from the fundamentalist Islamic ideology of the likes of Khomeini and the regime’s terrorist proxies in the region. Its interpretation of Islam is one which gives solid ideological grounds for embracing science and modernity, and advancing modern social causes such as gender equality, participatory democracy and popular sovereignty. Currently, the entire leadership council of the MEK is comprised of women.

The MEK is impenetrable against fundamentalist propaganda, since it challenges Islamic extremism not from the position of “enemies of Islam,” but as committed Muslims. Blessed with the most effective and practical ideological and cultural weapon, the MEK has emerged as the antithesis to the fundamentalist and extremist ideology haunting the Middle East under the veneer of Islam. Three decades ago, former Undersecretary of State George Ball chastised Western press for characterizing the MEK as Marxist. He wrote, “The sloppy press habit of dismissing the Mujahedeen as ‘leftists’ badly confuses the problem. Masud [Massoud] Rajavi… is the leader of the movement. Its intention is to replace the current backward Islamic regime with a modernized Shiite Islam drawing its egalitarian principles from Koranic sources rather then Marx.”[13]

Endnotes:
[1] Fear of Ill-treatment/possible prisoner of conscience, Public AI Index: MDE 13/128/2007, Amnesty International, November 2, 2007, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE13/128/2007/en/d6ea449a-d359-11dd-a329-2f46302a8cc6/mde131282007en.pdf
[2] Afshin Matin-Asgari, 2004, “From social democracy to social democracy: the twentieth-century odyssey of the Iranian Left“. In: Cronin, Stephanie, editor. Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left: London and New York: Routledge Curzon. pp. 37-64 (cited originally in Iran Policy Committee, White Paper, Sept. 13, 2005, p. 42. http://www.iranpolicycommittee.org).
[3] Ervand Abrahamian, The Iranian Mojahedin, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 187
[4] Ibid. p. 218
[5] Ibid. p. 207.
[6] Massoud Rajavi, interview, “We Are on the Offensive,” Time Magazine, September 14, 1981.
[7] According to the French daily Le Monde, “some 10,000 people presented their admission cards to listen for three hours to the lectures […and additionally] the courses [were] recorded on video cassettes and distributed in 35 cities. They [were] also published in paperback and sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies.” Le Monde, Paris, 29 March 1980.
[8] Mehrzad Boroujerdi, “Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism“, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996. pp. 117-9 (cited originally in Iran Policy Committee, White Paper, September. 13, 2005, p. 42. http://www.iranpolicycommittee.org).
[9] In March 1980, Le Monde wrote: “The daily Jomhouri Islami has devoted entire pages to writings against the Mojahedin and its leadership. On the eve of the election, hundreds of thousands of newsletters abounding in vituperations were distributed. In one, Mr. Rajavi is described as a SAVAK agent. Doubtless, the fundamentalist clergy consider these leftist Muslims a greater enemy than the Marxist organizations, easily discredited with the label of atheist.” (Le Monde, Paris, March 29, 1980).
[10] Ervand Abrahamian, a US historian, writes that the communist Tudeh and Majority faction of the Fedayeen “pleaded with the Mojahedin to join their Anti-Imperialist Democratic Front; to remember that the United States was still Iran’s main enemy; to avoid allying with pro¬-Western liberals,” adding that the Minority faction of the Fedayeen (still opposed to the regime) accused the Mojahedin of “flirting with pro-American liberals such as Bazargan.” The author writes that “the Mojahedin rebuffed the pleas and criticism.” Op. cit., p. 215.
[11] Graham E. Fuller, “The Center of the Universe: The Geopolitics of Iran,” (Westview Press: 1991), p. 179.
[12] Jonathan Randal, “Iranian Leftists Emerge From Isolation,” The Washington Post, 3 December 1979.
[13] George W. Ball, Op-Ed, “Iran’s Bleak Future,” The Washington Post, August 19, 1981.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-safavi/mujahedin-e-khalq-pmoimek_b_482770.html

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America, terrorists and Nelson Mandela

January 15, 2010 by

REUTERS NEWS AGENCY

Woe betide the organization or individual who lands on America’s terrorist list. The consequences are dire and it’s easier to get on the list than off it even if you turn to peaceful politics. Just ask Nelson Mandela.

One of the great statesmen of our time, Mandela stayed on the American terrorist blacklist for 15 years after winning the Nobel Prize prior to becoming South Africa’s first post-Apartheid president. He was removed from the list after then president George W. Bush signed into law a bill that took the label “terrorist” off members of the African National Congress (ANC), the group that used sabotage, bombings and armed attacks against the white minority regime.

The ANC became South Africa’s governing party after the fall of apartheid but the U.S. restrictions imposed on ANC militants stayed in place. Why? Bureaucratic inertia is as good an explanation as any and a look at the current list of what is officially labelled Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTOs) suggests that once a group earns the designation, it is difficult to shake.

The consequences of a U.S. terrorist designation include freezing an organisation’s funds, banning its members from travelling to the U.S. and imposing harsh penalties (up to 15 years in prison) on people who provide “material support or resources” to an FTO.

At present, there are 44 groups on the list, ranged in alphabetical order from the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organisation to the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia. The Abu Nidal group, according to the government’s own country reports on terrorism, “is largely considered inactive.” The Congressional Research Service, a bipartisan agency which provides research and analysis for Congress, has wondered why it is still on the list.

One can ask the same about the Colombian group, added to the list in 2001. The bulk of the paramilitary organisation demobilized years ago and the latest U.S. government report says its “organizational structure no longer exists.”

In between Abu Nidal and the Colombians are groups whose terrorist acts and future intentions are undisputed – al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad – as well as one which is waging a protracted legal battle to have its terrorist label taken off.

EUROPE, U.S. OUT OF SYNCH
That is the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian resistance group on which the United States is out of synch with Britain and the 27-member European Union. After years of legal wrangling, Britain took the MEK off its terrorist blacklist in 2008 and the EU followed suit last year. In the last week of the administration of George W. Bush, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied the  group’s petition that its terrorist label be taken off.

The MEK’s case came up again this week in a wood-panelled Washington courtroom where high-powered lawyers debated whether Rice had acted “reasonably” in doing so.

Yes, she had, the government’s lawyer, Douglas Letter, told the three-judge panel, given the MEK’s past history of violence. In his written brief, he scoffed at “claims that ‘the tiger has changed its stripes,’” a reference to the group’s contention that it had foresworn violent acts in 2001 in favor of peaceful change.

Rulings by foreign courts, the argument went, were not germane to the case in the U.S. Those decisions included one by Britain’s Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC), a body established to review disputes over terrorist designations. The POAC found it would be “perverse” to stick to that label and ordered the Home Office to remove the MEK from the terrorist blacklist.

When the Washington Court of Appeals will rule on the MEK’s latest (and fifth) petition is not clear but if the past is any guide, political rather than legal considerations will decide the fate of the group in the U.S. American administrations have been using the terrorist organizations list and a separate list of “state sponsors of terrorism” as political tools.

Washington added the MEK to the terrorist list in 1997, at a time when the Clinton administration hoped the move would facilitate opening a dialogue with Iran and its newly-elected President, Mohammad Khatami, who was seen as moderate open to better relations with the U.S. The MEK served as a bargaining chip but the hoped-for dialogue didn’t go anywhere.

Neither did President Barack Obama’s diplomatic overtures to the theocrats ruling Iran. There has been no apparent progress on negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and the government has turned deaf ears to international criticism of increasingly savage repression of anti-government dissent. Obama was guarded in his initial reaction to the crackdown on popular protests that erupted after Iran’s elections in June.

But he finally spoke out against the government in December: “For months, the Iranian people have sought nothing more than to exercise their universal rights. Each time they have done so, they have been met with the iron fist of brutality, even on solemn occasions and holy days.”

Despite the tough language, he has obviously not given up hope for negotiations. “We … want to keep the door to dialogue open,” Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said in January. Which probably means that the MEK, hated by Iran’s rulers, will retain its role as a bargaining counter and stay on the terrorist list.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2010/01/15/america-terrorists-and-nelson-mandela/

Filed Under: Bernd Debusmann, News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Human bargaining chips in deals with Iran

August 20, 2009 by

REUTERS NEWS AGENCY

Seven summers ago, in a crowded conference room of a Washington hotel, an Iranian exile leader gave the first detailed public account of Iran’s until-then secret nuclear projects at the cities of Natanz and Arak. It greatly turned up the volume of a seemingly endless international controversy over Iran’s nuclear intentions.

The disclosures, on August 14, 2002, did little to earn the group that made them, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), merit points from the U.S. government. A year later, the Washington office of the NCRI, the political offshoot of Iran’s Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) resistance movement, was shut. The State Department placed the group on its list of terrorist organizations. (The MEK, also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran, had been given that designation in 1997).

Now, another five summers later, two dozen MEK supporters are on hunger strike across from the White House to exhort the U.S. government to stick to promises to protect some 3,500 members of the organization in a camp north of Baghdad. Iraqi forces stormed Camp Ashraf in late July and the MEK says nine residents were killed in the initial assault. Two have since died of their injuries.

Hunger strikes in solidarity with the residents of Camp Ashraf were also taking place in Berlin, London, Brussels and Ottawa and at the camp itself. They draw attention to an arrangement that was both unique and bizarre – an enclave of people labeled terrorists by Washington but protected by U.S. military forces – and speak volumes about erratic U.S. policies on a group hated by Iran’s theocracy.

Those at Camp Ashraf, including around 1,000 women, have become, in effect, bargaining chips in the complicated relationship between the United States, Iraq and Iran. The raid on the camp coincided with a visit to Iraq by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. What better way for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to demonstrate  that the Iraqis, not the Americans, are in charge now that Iraqi troops have assumed control under the Status of Forces Agreement signed last year?

What better way, too for Maliki, once derided as an American puppet, to show Iran’s hard-liners and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated government wants to tighten relations with Tehran? The raid on Camp Ashraf drew applause from Iranian officials, including Ali Larijani, the hard-line speaker of parliament. “Praiseworthy,” he said, “even though it is rather late.”

The MEK was founded in 1965 by leftist students and intellectuals opposed to the Shah of Iran, and it played a part in the Islamic revolution that toppled his rule in 1979. But it soon fell out with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and was banned in 1981, when it began a campaign of bombings and assassinations of government officials.

WARNINGS OF HUMANITARIAN DISASTER

In 1986, under an agreement with Saddam Hussein, it established bases in Iraq from where it launched cross-border raids into Iran.

Since 2003, when U.S. forces disarmed MEK guerrillas in Camp Ashraf and took over its protection, the government in Iran has repeatedly demanded that they be turned over to Iran. Their prospects there would be bleak, more so at a time when the Iranian government is staging mass trials of people who demonstrated against Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in June.

In an open letter to President Barack Obama, in the form of a full-page advertisement in the Washington Times, MEK supporters this week warned of a humanitarian disaster unless U.S. forces reassumed control, at least temporarily. “The long-term solution to the problem is the presence in Ashraf of United Nations forces or at least a U.N. monitoring mission.”

This is not the first time that the MEK has served as a bargaining chip in Middle Eastern politics. The group was placed on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations in 1997 at a time when the Clinton administration hoped the move would facilitate opening a dialogue with Iran and its newly elected president, Mohammad Khatami, who was seen as a moderate.

The European Union put the MEK on its terrorist blacklist five years later. Critics of the decision saw it as kowtowing to Iranian demands to avoid harming important trade relations. After years of legal wrangling, the EU took the MEK off its list of banned terrorist organizations on Jan. 26, a decision that infuriated Tehran.

Somewhat ironically for a country described as the world’s “most active state sponsor of terrorism” by the U.S. State Department, Iran said the EU’s decision meant Europe had “distanced itself from the path of the international community in fighting terror.”

The Obama administration has shown no sign of even considering taking the MEK off the terrorist list and thus further complicate its already complicated relations with Iran. Is abandoning the people at Camp Ashraf to an uncertain fate an option?

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/08/20/human-bargaining-chips-in-deals-with-iran/

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Increasing Pressure on Iranian Opposition in Iraq

August 4, 2008 by

PolicyWatch #1394
By Raymond Tanter
August 4, 2008

Throughout summer 2008, Iraqi politicians tied to Tehran have put increasing political pressure on the U.S. government to allow Baghdad to control Camp Ashraf, the base housing Iran’s main opposition — the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK). Options regarding Iraqi-based MEK members are limited, but include the following: sending them to the United States; allowing them to stay in Iraq under Iraqi control; dispersing them to surrounding countries, including Iran; or maintaining the status quo with the continued protection of the U.S. military. Since each option is problematic, finding a solution is neither easy nor simple.

Escalating Pressure

On July 4, 2008, Iran’s Fars News Agency reported that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, called for MEK’s expulsion from Iraq, adding that the group “instigates tribal conflicts, interferes in the internal affairs of Iraq, and creates hostility between the parliament and government of Iraq and the Iraqi electorate.” On July 8, Iraqi government spokesman Abbas Bayati told al-Zaman: “The presence of the Mujahedin Organization in Iraq is illegal. We will ask the United States to put Camp Ashraf, the [MEK’s] bastion, under the control of the Iraqi government.”

On July 9, an English language agency of the Iranian regime, Press TV, reported, “Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari has declared the imminent expulsion of members of Mujahedin-e Khalq from Iraq.” And on July 10, Iran’s ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kezemi-Qomi, told Press TVthat “an Iraqi committee has been formed to expel the . . . [MEK] from the country.”

International Law

International humanitarian law is vital to the MEK issue, especially if the group’s adversaries succeed in their efforts. Coalition forces recognize the residents of Ashraf as “protected persons” under the Fourth Geneva Convention, as does the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). In 2004, the ICRC reiterated its position in a letter stating: “Those persons who are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention remain protected by the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

And in March 2007, the ICRC reminded relevant authorities “of their obligations to act in accordance with the principle of non-refoulement [a term in international law that concerns the protection of refugees dispersed to countries where they would face persecution] when transferring persons to another state or authority.” This statement is an acknowledgment of the nontransferable status of the protection of Ashraf under the present circumstances.

During the same year, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reiterated its position that “bodies of international law, particularly international humanitarian law and human rights law, have positive relevance to the Ashraf situation and could confer protections on individuals who fear serious risks if returned to their country of origin.” As such, UNHCR cautioned Iraqi authorities and the coalition “to refrain from any action that could endanger the life or security of these individuals, such as their forcible deportation from Iraq or their forced displacement inside Iraq.”

In February 2006, Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, the coalition’s deputy commanding general, reiterated the protected-persons status of the people of Ashraf. He acknowledged coalition responsibilities regarding the Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of civilians, stating, “The coalition remains deeply committed to the security and rights of the protected people of Ashraf and the principle of non-refoulement.”

Problematic Options

Assuming a transfer of MEK members were possible, many questions remain regarding their destination. There are many reasons why it would be difficult for the European and U.S. governments, or Iraq’s Kurdish regional bloc, to accept the MEK en masse to their territories.

Moving the group’s members to the United States, for instance, is currently impossible because of MEK’s status as a foreign terrorist organization. This status could change, however, if the designation is lifted in October 2008 when the Department of State performs a regular review process. This appears to be a viable possibility given recent developments in the United Kingdom, where the British government was forced to remove the group from its terrorist list after an independent judicial commission — one ratified by a British appeals court — determined that such a designation was no longer appropriate.

If Ashraf’s security responsibilities were transferred to Iraqi security forces, as demanded by the Iranian regime, it would be a flagrant violation of international laws and conventions. Since it is widely reported that the Iranian regime has infiltrated Iraqi military and security forces, and wields significant influence within the government, such a move would certainly invite a humanitarian catastrophe. No U.S. president would want to leave such a legacy.

Moreover, dispersing the MEK, in addition to being illegal, is likely to decrease the international community’s leverage over the Iranian regime. Because the regime pays more attention to the opposition in Iraq than all other opposition groups combined, a case could be made to rely on the MEK as leverage to encourage Tehran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons capability.

Conclusion

If MEK members remain in Iraq under the protection of U.S. forces, such an arrangement should be explicit in agreements negotiated between Iraq and the United States. Given that military components of the Iraqi government cannot be trusted to provide security for Ashraf and guarantee protected persons status conferred under the Fourth Geneva Convention, transfer to Iraqi control would risk a humanitarian disaster.

The argument for protecting the human rights of MEK members need not be based on a favorable view of the organization. One need not accept or reject the claim by some that the group provides useful intelligence, or that it is an important means to unsettle Tehran.

It would be especially unfortunate if the treatment of the MEK was harsher because of a desire to secure concessions from Tehran on the nuclear impasse. Not only is it inappropriate to abandon the principles of human rights for concessionary purposes, but such an approach would be counterproductive on the nuclear front. This strategy would show Iran that its nuclear program has won it leverage on unconnected issues — thus reducing Iran’s incentive to abandon its program — and it would destroy what is arguably Tehran’s main opposition.

Raymond Tanter, a visiting professor of government at Georgetown University, is an adjunct scholar at The Washington Institute, researching U.S. policy options toward Iran.

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2919

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A Roadmap for the Foreign Terrorist Organizations List

April 25, 2008 by

PolicyWatch #1366

By Patrick Clawson
April 25, 2008

Although the Foreign Terrorist Organizationslist has a set of criteria for designating groups, there is little clarity in practice about the process for revocation. Even after organizations have renounced terrorism for many years, their designations persist without a clear explanation, and are based on the assumption that historical violence indicates future potential.

A November 2007 court ruling by the UK’s Proscribed Organizations Appeals Commission (POAC) ordered the British government to remove the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran — known to the U.S. government as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) — from its terrorist organizations list. This decision, along with a similar decision by the European Court of First Instance (a level below the European Court of Justice), and the mandatory review of the group’s designation by the U.S. State Department in October 2008, provides an opportunity to evaluate how terrorist designation is assessed. According to the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act, if no designation review is conducted during a five-year period, the U.S. secretary of state must determine whether a revocation is appropriate.

The Role of Non-Terrorist Criteria

Any designation review should be based only on terrorism issues, not on the general U.S. government view of the organization in question. If the decision to designate a group is made on foreign policy considerations rather than evidence, then the list will be branded as a political instrument, thus reducing its utility as a means for encouraging other governments to take action against certain terrorist organizations. This is what happened to the list of terrorism-sponsoring states, which simply looks like a set of countries the U.S. government does not like.

In the MEK’s case, its designation should not be based on the group’s political stance or worries about U.S.-Iranian relations, nor should it be a reward for its reports on Iran’s nuclear activities. Over the past three years, the State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism have cited no alleged MEK terrorist activity since 2001, yet have increased allegations pertaining the group’s non-terrorist activities. The 2007 edition of the Reports, due out by the end of April 2008, is bound to continue this trend.

These allegations — support for the U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran in 1979, allegiance to Islamic Marxism, suppression of Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, participation in the oil for food scandal, and the self-immolation of its supporters during protests — are not related to the legal criteria for terrorist designation and are probably meant to discredit the MEK. These allegations are irrelevant, and some are also based on contestable evidence. This example of irrelevant information reinforces the need for the State Department to create explicit guidelines by which it moves a group from designation to revocation.

Dealing with History

History plays an important part in terrorist designation, especially when considering groups that no longer participate in violent activity. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is one such example. The PLO clearly used to be a terrorist group, but now enjoys good relations with the United States. Since the PLO complied with the 1993 Declaration of Principles and renounced terrorism, the organization was not listed on the State Department’s first edition of its Foreign Terrorist Organizations list in 1997 or in President Clinton’s 1995 Executive Order 12947 on Middle East terrorism. Since the reevaluation of the PLO designation preceded the creation of the State Department list and the subsequent legislation regulating the process of review, the PLO case provides little insight into how revocation would occur under the current system.

In contrast, the November 2007 POAC ruling is a more recent and relevant example of terrorist designation review. In fact, the 144-page POAC ruling addresses the historical actions of the MEK in detail. Regarding the past seven years, the POAC finds,

Whatever the accurate characterization of the organization’s activities between 1980 and 2001, the position in 2006-2007 is radically different, and has been so since 2001…The [MEK] has conducted no military activity of any kind since about August 2001, whether in Iran or elsewhere in the world…This is attributable to a deliberate decision of the [MEK] made at an extraordinary congress held in Iraq in June 2001, namely, to abandon all military action (or activities) in Iran…There is no evidence that the [MEK] has at any time since 2003 sought to re-create any form of structure that was capable of carrying out or supporting terrorist acts. There is no evidence of any attempt to “prepare” for terrorism. There is no evidence of any encouragement to others to commit acts of terrorism…. The above factors, combined with the 5 years that had since passed since the summer of 2001, demanded the conclusion that continued proscription could not be lawfully justified.

Inherent in the POAC order to revoke MEK’s designation — an order the UK government is appealing — are three principles: the organization’s formal decision to renounce violence, the cessation of terrorist activity, and the five year period of peace. Perhaps the Department of State does not want to use these particular principles when re-evaluating a group’s terrorist designation, but it should adopt a set of guidelines and explain them to the public. It should also explain how it applies those principles in each case; if the MEK is designated, some specific reasons should be given. Preferably, the State Department should provide a road map for what a designated group must do to be removed from the list. For the MEK, what, if anything, must it do to show it has renounced terrorism in practice as well as in theory.

Conclusion

While the State Department routinely reinstated MEK’s designation as a terrorist group on April 8, it must do a more formal and in-depth review by October 2008. That review’s decision should be based on two factors. First, the State Department should only decide if the group is or is not a terrorist group, and not bring in irrelevant information. The criteria should be used in an unbiased, professional manner, relying on evidence rather than prejudice or rumor.

Second, the decision should be based on clear set of rules regarding how the U.S. government revokes this kind of designation. At present, it seems that past terrorist activities — no matter how old or far removed — are susceptible to being interpreted as evidence of future potential, consequently justifying a group’s continued designation. In contrast, the POAC has set forward several useful principles for evaluating an organization’s violent past and peaceful present; the U.S. government should do the same.

Patrick Clawson is deputy director for research at The Washington Institute.

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2808

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West should back Iranians

February 1, 2008 by

United Press International
February 1, 2008
By BARONESS GOULD OF POTTERNEWTON

LONDON, Feb. 1 (UPI) — Iran under the mullahs is the only country in the world that continues to hang children, and it has an equally sinister track record over its treatment of women.
On Jan. 15, Amnesty International said in a report that nine women and two men in Iran are waiting to be stoned to death, adding that the “horrific practice” was “specifically designed to increase the suffering of the victims.”

“The majority of those sentenced to death by stoning are women. Women suffer disproportionately from such punishment. One reason is that they are not treated equally before the law and courts, in clear violation of international fair trial standards,” Amnesty International said.

Rahele Zamani, 27, was hanged in Evin Prison in Tehran in December. Her 3-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter are now orphans.

At least 113,454 women were detained by state security forces for being “improperly dressed” over the summer in the Iranian capital alone, according to Tehran police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan.

Maltreatment of women is indoctrinated in the regime’s ideology. The mullahs’ Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said last July, “We are witnessing in our country that some women activists and some men are trying to play with Islamic laws … in order to harmonize them with international conventions related to women. This is wrong. … They shouldn’t see the solution in changing Islamic jurisprudence laws.”

Earlier this month Ibrahim Lotfollahi, a 27-year-old student from Payam Nour University in the western Iranian city of Sanandaj, was tortured to death by agents of the regime’s notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Local authorities tried to pass off the cold-blooded murder as suicide and they refused permission to Lotfollahi’s parents to exhume the corpse of their son who had been buried without their knowledge. The revelations regarding the true surroundings of Lotfollahi’s tragic death came from Iranian opposition activists.

The case serves as a stark reminder of what life can be like for those brave people in Iran who choose to speak their minds and take a stand against the theocratic dictatorship. But, in an unforgivable incongruity, the British government has thus far chosen to side with the mullahs instead of the millions of Iranians longing for change.

For years, our government has been appeasing the regime in exchange for lucrative trade deals in the vain hope of convincing the mullahs to abandon their terrorist tactics abroad. The climax came in 2001, when our Home Secretary Jack Straw accepted the regime’s demand that he ban its main democratic opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran.

Turning a blind eye to the execution of 120,000 PMOI sympathizers by the regime, our government went so far as to persuade the EU to ban the PMOI as well.

When in December 2006, the European Court of Justice annulled the EU’s ban on the PMOI, our government shamefully pressured the EU Council of Ministers to ignore the verdict of Europe’s highest court. But in November 2007, following an appeal by 35 parliamentarians from all aisles, the United Kingdom’s Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission ruled that the government’s ban on the PMOI was “flawed” and “perverse.” It ordered the new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to immediately submit an Order to Parliament lifting the ban on the group.

Whereas one could not be blamed for thinking that justice had prevailed, the government has since announced that it would appeal the decision despite losing its application for grounds to appeal.

On Jan. 23, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe described POAC’s verdict on the PMOI case as a “slap in the face” for the government and called on the EU/U.K. to “implement immediately the decisions of competent European and national judicial institutions affecting the status of the listed persons or entities.”

It remains unclear what the government’s next step will be. Meanwhile in Tehran, the regime continues to torture and execute political prisoners. When challenged over its brutal practices, it simply responds that it is killing those who the EU/U.K. class as terrorists.

The people of Iran deserve freedom. While military action against Iran is out of the question, we in the United Kingdom should be assisting the Iranian people by exposing the mullahs’ barbaric practices and urging the U.N. Security Council to impose trade sanctions on the regime for its gross violations of human rights. But the first step in getting on the side of the Iranian people is for the government to lift the ban on the PMOI immediately.

(Baroness Gould of Potternewton is a Labor Peer. She has been a deputy speaker of the House of Lords since 2002.)

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EU’s flawed combat against terrorism

January 28, 2008 by

Monday, 28 January 2008
Goesta Groenroos
OpEdNews.com

“Injustice is the best ally for terrorism,” reiterated Dick Marty, the Swiss senator in a press conference last week following the ratification of a resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe condemning the methods used by the EU and the UN Security Council for blacklisting groups and individuals.

This resolution by Europe’s human rights watchdog, was based on a report pointing out that the use of terrorist lists by the EU and UN is arbitrary and violates fundamental rights, thus putting at risk the very the fabric of a democratic society, i.e. the rule of law

What is more tragic is that, under the cloak of combating terrorism, the terrorist list in some cases has been used a bargaining chip with rough dictatorships and terror masters. The treatment of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), the principal Iranian resistance movement, is very telling as it was singled out as one of the most egregious cases in the Council of Europe’s report. As Dick Marty put it, cases such as the PMOI controversy are an example of the “disastrous” effects of the blacklists.
The PMOI, a democratic anti-fundamentalist Islamic movement, has been the primary victim of the clerical regime’s suppression at home. Tens of thousands of its members and supporters have been executed by the religious tyrants ruling Iran over the years. Its members have been the primary target of the Iranian hit-squads all over Europe. The Iranian resistance movement was classified as a terrorist organization in the UK in March 2001 on the behest of the Iranian government, as Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary of Britain acknowledged in an 2006 interview: “”¦They (the Iranian government) were demanding and actually successfully of me when I was the Home secretary that we should ban a terrorist organization MEK (PMOI) that was working against Iran.”

As a subsequent of 9/11, the EU started to draw its terrorist list in 2001. In May 2002, as the EU terrorist list was updated, the PMOI, the pivotal member organization of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the coalition of Iranian opposition groups, was added to the list. Here too, the oppressors of the Iranian people turned to Her Majesty’s government to do their dirty work.

The PMOI successfully challenged its listing in EU’s Court of First Instance. In December 2006, in a landmark verdict, the Court of First Instance annulled the inclusion of the PMOI in the terrorist list. The EU Council chose not to appeal the verdict.

The ruling reiterated that during the listing process, the fundamental rights of the PMOI, including “the right to a fair hearing, the obligation to state reasons and the right to effective judicial protection” were infringed.

If that were not enough to get the Iranian resistance movement off the hook, 35 prominent members of both Houses of the British Parliament from all three major parties submitted an appeal to a special court, the Proscribed Organizations Appeals Commission (POAC), urging the removal of the PMOI from the UK terrorist list. This Commission was specifically set up by the British Government to review appeals by proscribed organizations.

Subsequent to 6 months of exhaustive review, including 5 days of open and 2 days of closed hearing, on November 30, 2007 the Court ruled against the British Government and the proscription. The Court ordered the Government to lay an order before Parliament removing the PMOI from the proscribed list.

In the unprecedented ruling, the Court described the Government’s failure to de-proscribe the PMOI as ‘perverse’ and ‘flawed’ while further adding that the decision ‘must be set aside’. The Court stated: “We recognize that a finding of perversity is uncommon. We believe, however, that this Commission is in the (perhaps unusual) position of having before it all of the material that is relevant to this decision.”The PMOI inclusion in the EU terrorist list was condemned by more than 8500 lawyers throughout Europe, as well as a majority of members of parliaments in the UK, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, Norway, and hundreds of members of the European Parliament.

One would have expected that the EU would pay heed to all these court rulings and growing chorus to remove the PMOI from the terrorist list. But this blatant violation of the rule of law by individuals whose duty it is to uphold them continues. What is equally serious, this great injustice imposed on the Iranian people and their Resistance in order to appease the fundamentalist dictatorship persists.

Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the NCRI pointed out that by deciding to maintain the PMOI on its terrorist list, the EU Council is absolutely isolated and is defying two pillars of European democracy, namely Europe’s judicial and legislative institutions. Insisting on the same policy, the Council is not only in breach of the law, but also has defied the will of representatives of millions of Europeans who are represented in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. She called on the EU member states to remove the PMOI from the terrorist list and not allow such lawlessness and scandal, originally imposed on the Council by the British government, to continue.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King while sitting in a Birmingham Jail, in 1963.

So if EU wants to be taken seriously and be effective in the fight against terrorism, it should fight injustice and stop trampling on the rights of the Iranian Resistance that wants to wrest Iran from the clutches of their hideous, Islamic fundamentalism mongering oppressors.

Goesta Groenroos is Researcher in philosophy at Stockholm University and an expert on Iran

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Mojahedin of Iran are “not concerned with terrorism”

January 25, 2008 by

Friday, 25 January 2008
Source: Le Soir, Belgium daily

By maintaining the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI / MEK) on the European list of terrorist organizations, the 27 EU countries are “no longer following the rule of law… PMOI’s fundamental rights continue to be violated,” says a report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted on Wednesday by an overwhelming majority.

And what about a case of an Italian citizen residing in Switzerland, found innocent in the courts of Italy and Switzerland, but fails to remove his name from the list of terrorists drawn up by the U.N. Security Council? Neither Bern nor Rome do have the requisite powers to counter the injustice in New York. Worse still, the two capitals may not know why the individual was placed on blacklist.

The report that has been prepared by a Swiss parliamentarian, the chairman of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights was ratified by the almost unanimous vote on Wednesday after a long debate. Dick Marty is the same person who had investigated the CIA flights.

Mr. Marty explained that the development of such lists had “nothing to do with the law”, was the result of a “political deal”, and that this was a “totally unacceptable system”, “perverse” (the word was used by a London court to describe proscription used against the Iranian opposition movement, PMOI).

“We cannot fight Terrorism with injustice. These blacklists are our Guantanamo, “said Marty. The vote on the report by 101 in favor, 3 against and 4 abstentions, is revealing: the rare opposition came from British, Polish and Romanian parliamentarians.

In political terms, the report confirms the injustice done to the main Iranian opposition movement, PMOI, despite favorable judgments handed down in 2006 and 2007 by the courts in Luxembourg and London. As a reminder, PMOI is a previously armed movement – its latest military operations dates back to June 2001 – which Britain has placed in March 2001 on its national list of banned organizations. London then put pressure on the EU to add this organization to its list.

Since then, the Mojahedin are fighting in two fronts – Luxembourg and London – to get them off the lists. Their argument, recently confirmed in law: Only it is London that alleges them based on single report secret evidence that is empty and fueled by the Tehran regime and broadcasted by London and Brussels.

The game in London is more astonishing, as stated yesterday by the British socialist Rudi Vis, if we finally recognize that PMOI had “not been concerned with terrorism” this would enable the Mojahedin to present itself as the “main opposition” to the mullahs, which would mean “taking a big step in the establishment of democracy in Iran.”

The first court victory by PMOI goes back to December 2006 when the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, found that the evidence that Europe gathered were insufficient. Brussels has responded by adopting a “new policy”, a trick that obsoletes the judgment. The latest European list of terrorist organizations, released in December, continues to consider PMOI as “terrorist”. But according to the report which has just voted on Wednesday by the Council of Europe, the new EU regulation suffers the same deficiencies as the previous legislation: “In all cases, the ‘new’ procedures are also as failing as that previous” Marty noted in the report.

And already PMOI has taken the new procedures, as a matter of urgency, to the European Court. The victory of PMOI is clear on this front and one can expect that Brussels will be more readily condemned. Since it was the London which has nourished a pseudo-intelligence dossier against the Mojahedin, they have attacked the British list. Since the list is prepared on the basis of secret documents; it should take a special administrative court – Proscribed Organizations Appeal Commission (POAC) – whose magistrates have security clearances required to consult the secret documents.

On 30 November, POAC delivered a judgment which is a slap in the face of London: the British government was forced to propose to parliament the withdrawal of PMOI form the list of banned organizations. Arguments: the Home Office has misinterpreted the law, has ignored important facts, and ultimately took a “perverse” decision against the PMOI. This is good news for the Iranian opposition. But as recalled Dick Marty, it is still 370 people in the world (including one Italian-Swiss) whose assets are frozen when they were merely “suspected” of terrorism.

The report was translated from French by NCRI-FAC

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Placating tyranny

January 24, 2008 by

Thursday, 24 January 2008
By LORD CORBETT OF CASTLE VALE Chair, British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom

A judgment last year described the government’s ban on Iran’s PMOI as ‘unlawful’ – will Jack Straw ever admit to his part in it?

The Guardian, January 21, 2008 – Rarely has a verdict been so damning to the government as that issued on November 30 last year by the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission (POAC) over the case of the main democratic Iranian opposition, the PMOI.

Since 2001, at the behest of Iran’s theocratic leaders, the government had banned the PMOI as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000, without a shred of evidence. The former home secretary, Jack Straw, admitted in 2006 that he had banned the PMOI because the mullahs had demanded it.

The terror tag caused anger among parliamentarians on all sides, since the movement had seen 120,000 of its members executed by the regime because of their defence of democracy and human rights. In spring 2006, 35 MPs and lords launched a legal challenge to the ban. The government used every opportunity to delay the hearings. Its case was as thin as it was phoney.

Finally, POAC ruled that the PMOI is not concerned in terrorism. It found that the home secretary’s decision to refuse the application that we had made for de-proscription was “flawed”, “perverse” and “must be set aside”.

Having ruled that the secretary of state got the law wrong and failed to take account of all relevant facts, POAC added: ” … having carefully considered all the material before us, we have concluded that the decision [of the secretary of state] … is properly characterised as perverse.” Thus, POAC ordered the new home secretary to “lay before parliament the draft of an order under section 3(3)(b) of the 2000 act removing the PMOI from the list of proscribed organisations”.

Immediately after the damning judgement, the Home Office announced it would seek leave to appeal; leave to appeal that was resoundingly rejected by POAC. The suspicion is this was yet another attempt in the failed policy of appeasing the mullahs.

This is not the first time the government has refused to obey the law. In Dec 2006, the European court of justice ruled that the PMOI should be removed from the EU’s list of individuals and groups whose assets were frozen as part of the “war on terrorism”. The PMOI were added to this list in 2002 while Straw was foreign secretary and had a habit of making frequent and fruitless trips to visit Tehran as it began its uranium enrichment activities.

That judgment described the ban on the PMOI as “unlawful” and said it must be annulled. Immediately, however, government representatives in the EU began to make the rounds in Brussels, urging the 27-nation bloc to ignore the ruling. And so they did. In June of last year, the EU council of ministers decided that it would “maintain” the PMOI in the terrorist list – in blatant violation of its own laws.

Attempts by the UK/EU to persuade the mullahs to abandon their bid for nuclear weapons and to stop killing British troops in Iraq have failed. The last thing our world needs is the mullahs’ lethal mix of violent fundamentalism and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

POAC’s decision signals that the Iranian resistance – demonised, vilified, unjustly labelled terrorist – wants no more than to help the people of Iran to rid themselves of the misrule of the mullahs.

I now invite Straw to apologise for the hurt and harm he has done to the Iranian resistance. He acknowledged when he banned the PMOI that it had no presence in the UK or any record of damage to UK or western interests in the Middle East – a novel definition of terrorism.

The pledge of Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the coalition National Council of Resistance of Iran which includes the PMOI, is for freedom, democracy and social justice which ensures women have an equal share in the nation’s affairs in an Iran which separates religion and state – a new Iran that can take its place in the international community rather than being a loathed and dangerous pariah.

Iran will be free. It needs the new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, to distance herself from Straw’s dodgy record towards the democratic Iranian opposition by de-proscribing the PMOI immediately.

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Empower Iranian people for democratic change

January 23, 2008 by

Wednesday, 23 January 2008

NCRI – Speaking to a meeting in Atlanta on Monday, January 21, Professor Raymond Tanter, president of the Iran Policy Committee said, “The most powerful tool the United States can use to put Tehran’s rulers on alert that gross violations of human rights must end is to empower the Iranian people for democratic change.”

“To this end, the United States should remove the terrorist designations of the main, democratic Iranian opposition groups. The evidence behind such designations is specious, and the hampering of the democratic opposition jeopardizes U.S. national security interests,” he reiterated.

Speaking on Dr. Martin Luther King Day, Professor Tanter explained King’s position on human rights abroad, which is based upon one fundamental principle: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

He went on to describe how impressively Dr. King’s legacy continued after his death and that “The ideals of Martin Luther King Jr. were a critical source of inspiration to democratic movements” around the world.

On human rights and democratic opposition in Iran he said, “The main opposition groups, the Mojahedin-e Khalq and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), in stark contrast to the regime, are democratic, inclusive of women, and have as one of their highest missions the protection of human rights in Iran. In fact, NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi has looked to Dr. King’s Birmingham Letter as a source of inspiration as the Iranian people are terrorized by those ruling Tehran.”

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